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Big Pulpit

HEAR ME The Rev. A. R. Bernard leads the Christian Cultural Center in East New York. He believes in treating his church members like customers: We say, FedEx-fast, Disney-friendly. Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

THE sloped main sanctuary fits 3,195 and could pass for a concert hall: cushioned chairs, a band, almost no religious adornments. The spire-less exterior is so utilitarian that when it first appeared in this East New York, Brooklyn, neighborhood, across from auto fixit shops, people thought it was the telephone company.

By 8 a.m. on Sunday, a jaunty worship song got the faithful swaying, clapping, rocking the house. Hallelujah! Then the offering and mellower music and bulletins about bus service. The goings-on shimmered on three big screens, interrupted, when necessary, by alerts for parents to report to the Kiddie Kingdom.

And then the Rev. A. R. Bernard, sheathed in a pinstriped suit, climbed the steps to the plexiglass pulpit of the Christian Cultural Center, the nondenominational church he founded nearly 30 years ago with 20 folding chairs that has swelled into the city’s largest, with 31,600 members. He fiddled with his laptop and Bible and looked out. He began to talk.

Thin-faced and scholarly, the pastor slid back in an upholstered chair beside his desk. It was a midweek afternoon, and he was talking about marketing, about customer service. Because what he does is peddle a product. Not a proprietary product, of course, but the same product as every minister: a relationship with God.

His upbeat brand of evangelism is what brings more than 10,000 predominantly black middle-class worshippers to the eastern edge of Brooklyn each week. His gift for translating Scripture into common-sense relevance “where the Bible meets the road that we walk on today,” as he put it, has produced an organization with an operating budget of $18.5 million on an 11.5-acre campus. The sweep of it all has elevated him, at 55, to one of the nation’s spiritual pillars: head of the Council of Churches of the City of New York, courted by politicians, listened to on radio and television by legions looking for faith and some answers.

A born-again banker, he preaches a few miles from where he grew up. He has been married to his high school girlfriend, Karen, since they were 19. She, as well as four of their seven sons, work at the church. They live with three dogs on Long Island, where both like to shoot guns and he rides motorcycles (she is itching for one).

His God is a benevolent God. “God is for you, not against you,” he said. “There is a whole lot taught about God is going to get you and throw you in hell. I don’t believe that. I don’t teach fire and brimstone.”

But, he warned, “We suffer the consequences of our choices, and there is a final judgment that God will execute on human society.”

Much of Mr. Bernard’s ministry has been built on stressing the personal responsibility of men, and at times the congregation has counted more men than women, a rarity in urban churches. Then word circulates and the women pile in.

He runs a tight, corporate-style church. Years ago he visited American Express and said he wanted to see its customer-service training program. The Amex people wanted to know the business he was in, and he said a church. This was an odd one, they thought, but they gave it to him.

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TIME FOR GOD More than 10,000 worship each week, including Robin Campos, with her tambourine.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

For 10 years, he schooled his staff in handling parishioners like credit-card customers. Right up until he decided he liked Disney World’s ways even better. “Now,” he said, “we say, ‘FedEx-fast, Disney-friendly.’ ”

Sunday, 9:05 a.m. “Jesus said he came to give you a rich and satisfying life,” the pastor preached. “My purpose is to equip you to lead a rich and satisfying life. This desire to give you a rich and satisfying life comes out of his goodness.”

He scribbled “goodness” on an easel. He drew arrows pointing to holiness and love. Congregants tapped notes on laptops. His sermons are plain-spoken, cadenced instruction, conversational chats that, he will say, “have everything but a fireplace in the back.”

His voice tolled over the crowd as he talked about how he once bent to the beliefs of the conservative holiness movement — how women could wear no makeup, no jewelry, no pants; how you couldn’t go to movies; and how he had a jazz album collection to kill for and how he threw it away, delighting the garbage collectors.

“I thought it was sin,” he said. “No, it was stupidity!”

It is one of the oldest stories, but it is his story. His mother, Adelina Bernard, was a sprinter in Panama who qualified for but did not compete in the 1952 Olympics. A restaurant owner got her pregnant at 20, and then wanted nothing to do with her.

When Alfonso Rogelio was 4, his mother moved them to Bedford-Stuyvesant and found clerical work. He liked numbers and imagined becoming a math teacher, until a part-time job at Bankers Trust became a vocation. To sweeten his bank income, he sold marijuana.

He became a follower of Elijah Muhammad. Then a secretary drew him to a Pentecostal meeting. The date was Jan. 11, 1975. The speaker was Nicky Cruz, former head of the vicious Mau Mau gang in Brooklyn. At the session, Mr. Bernard heard an inner voice whisper two things: “I am the God you are looking for” and “I and my word are one.”

“I felt like someone put a blowtorch to my chest and put it on full blast,” he recalled. “I started weeping. I was no longer the same person.”

Within three years, he had a church in a grubby storefront in Williamsburg. The ministry grew and then exploded: 100 members in 1980, 625 in 1989, 11,000 in 1999, 25,338 in 2005.

The church graduated to a loft, the auditorium of Automotive High School, the ballroom of a Day’s Inn, a Salvation Army hall, a recast A & P, and finally, in 2001, to the $12.5 million, 96,000-square-foot megachurch on Flatlands Avenue near Jamaica Bay. The church also runs a preparatory school nearby and operates a cafe, restaurant and bookstore; the pastor plans to add a theater, cultural center, senior housing and retail space to the campus.

As the freight of responsibility increased, his mother played her part, praying hard, until one day she announced, “I’m getting too old to get down on my knees to pray for you.”

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The Rev. A. R. Bernard overseeing a renewal of marriage vows.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

And he told her, “Mom, get knee pads.”

10:30 a.m. One service done, two to go. A crowd pressed into the bookstore to buy CDs of what it had just heard, $6. Two A.T.M.’s are in the lobby.

The pastor knows there are churches where services exhaust people. Where they “have 10 offerings and mug you for money so often that people get smart after a while and bring singles.” Here, time ticks away on a digital clock facing the stage. There are time sheets demarcating segments of the service. Stage managers. Tick, tick.

The pastor looked himself over. It was time to go again.

The monthly staff meeting on Saturday morning drew 600.

“Too many of these preachers today want celebrity,” the pastor told them.

He wrote on his easel: “Leaders set the example.”

All told, the church has a staff of 1,312 — 1,200 of them volunteers. You want to sing in the choir, you must first do customer-relations training, then be an usher for two months beside a veteran who will gauge your character. You pass muster, you sing.

Mr. Bernard, who has owned a barbershop, a financial-services company and an asbestos-removal firm, sees himself as an entrepreneurial role model his followers can envision for themselves. He frowns on colleagues who preach an extreme prosperity gospel, have jets and mink-upholstered Rolls-Royces, do blessings of the Cadillacs (Mr. Bernard periodically has a blessing of the motorcycles).

“I want to be a middle ground that they can reach,” he said. The pastor demurred about what the church pays him, but put his annual income, including speech and sermon sales, in the mid-six figures. On his birthday there is a pastoral offering, another for his wife on Mother’s Day. He also owns four rental houses on Long Island.

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By buying and improving properties, the Bernards have built themselves a handsome house of nearly 5,000 square feet in St. James, N.Y., a nearly all-white Suffolk County town. The pastor drives a Lexus, gets suits on sale at Brooks Brothers, has a Costco card.

He is a Republican who opposes abortion and gay lifestyles, believes in creationism and global warming. But he voted twice for Bill Clinton, and last year for Barack Obama. His endorsement was the first that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled in his bid for a third term.

His activism is quiet, selective. The first time he marched as a minister was in 2006, after Sean Bell was killed in a hail of police bullets outside a Queens nightclub. The next year, when Starrett City, the vast working- and middle-class apartment complex that abuts his church, was put up for sale, Mr. Bernard argued against the loss of affordable housing and got immersed in a group that tried to buy it.

“When you weigh in on every issue, you become an ambulance chaser,” he said. “You won’t see me work a picket line at City Hall. I’d rather have breakfast with the mayor.”

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The Rev. A. R. Bernard with his wife, Karen.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

At the staff meeting, he said: “A person who leads others to trust God and obey him must himself trust God enough to obey him.”

And: “You getting anything out of this?”

12:05 p.m. The pastor’s eyes twinkled with whimsy as he read the congregation a fictitious letter from grandma. Seems she had bought a bumper sticker reading “Honk if you love Jesus,” and when she got lost in thought at a stoplight that turned green, she discovered so many people who loved Jesus hitting their horns behind her that it just made her day.

The congregation roared. Yes, indeed, they were having fun.

Maureen’s Kitchen is the one with the cow’s head protruding over the front door. Monday is the pastor’s day off, and he likes to have breakfast with his sons at the ever-packed restaurant in Smithtown, N.Y.

Five of the seven appeared (one is an unofficial son, who joined the family at 14). A sixth couldn’t come, Mr. Bernard said, because he was in alcohol rehab; the seventh, who is habitually late, was waylaid by the boiler man. On the prospects of his arriving, the pastor said, “I don’t think in our lifetime.”

Ingesting voluminous calories, they rehashed a family narrative that did not always go perfectly but produced this: a father and sons at ease.

They ribbed Jamaal, a youth pastor, about how he was so accident-prone growing up that when they went out to dinner, they would make bets on whether he would break something.

Mr. Bernard reminded them about the belt with the Jesus Saves buckle that delivered discipline, until the boys, in cahoots with their mother, stuffed it behind the washing machine.

Alfonso, who oversees the church’s food service, said, “We’ve got to all go to the range.”

The pastor bought his first gun in 1994, after someone shot up the family home in Dix Hills. It was not long after one son had been threatened by a white classmate, and when a mosque leader had declared war against Mr. Bernard for saying the Nation of Islam’s beliefs about Christianity were wrong. The shooting was never solved.

His sons share his entrepreneurial fire: Alfonso and his father are looking to start a hot dog place and open an IHOP. Shon, a chef at the church, is contemplating a takeout place, Southern food.

Outside, the sons asked their father what he was doing next.

“I have to check with your mother,” he said. “It’s her day.”

Karen Bernard has good and bad days, having been found to have multiple sclerosis several years ago. She handles quality control for the church. Their marriage hit a stormy patch in the mid-1980s, when her husband was overly preoccupied with his ministry, and she felt neglected.

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EAGER In the early 1980s, lining up outside the Household of Faith, as the church was then known, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times

In 1985, he heard a pastor in Dallas preach about his own tangled marriage and it spoke to him. A morning praying alone in his hotel room began a years-long process that reset the balance.

Two Christmases ago the pastor brought her a poodle: Braxton. But the dog ignores her. “I’ll say Daddy’s coming, then he starts running,” she said. “Even the dog only wants his attention.”

In church, the congregation sees a preacher, a role model, a man interpreting God’s word.

“At home, he’s a little geeky,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to dance. When I listen to rap, he has no clue what they’re saying. He tries to seem cool. But, no, he’s not cool.”

12:50 p.m. At the altar call, a dozen or so parishioners trickled down the aisles to make a public commitment to Christ. Some came with heavy needs for the pastor to pray over, bring them something from the man he reverently calls “my boss.”

He believes in miracles. Not dial-a-miracle, not weekly serials of the paralyzed who walk, the blind who see, the dead who rise — the province of too many oily, faith-healing vaudeville acts.

“Listen, I don’t teach that God is some genie in a lamp and you rub the Bible three times and he pops out,” he said. “But the Bible gives hope. That’s what we deal in. That hope sometimes transfers into miracles.”

Through the laying on of hands, he feels God can act at any time. “The boss does it,” he said. “I’m just a vessel.”

He said he has seen some astonishing things. The first was a teenage girl who came to his storefront church and crumbled to the floor, convulsing. Her face turned blue, then green. She growled.

When he splashed holy oil on her forehead, he said, she spoke in a deep man’s voice and, though they had never met, referred to his wife and sons by name and said they were in danger. She bit a deacon on the hand, opening wounds; when Mr. Bernard touched her, she let go and the flesh was whole.

He said he visited one young woman at her house and saw her eat broth, then regurgitate nails. Real nails.

A possessed man punched a wall and broke his hand. Mr. Bernard said he sandwiched it between his and it healed.

He does not do exorcisms any more. They drained him. “Now I have staff,” he said.

The second service over, selected people were invited to see the pastor. He saw Curtis Martin, the retired Jets running back. Saw Salt of Salt-N-Pepa. Saw a young man floundering in his final year of high school. Too many want his ear. “If you love me, you will not kill me,” he tells his congregation. “I’m not the only one that God uses.”

3:20 p.m. Rain hissed outside. The Rev. A. R. Bernard was finishing another Sunday of endless Sundays. At these moments, he thinks to himself: “I hope they get it. I hope they understand.”